27 May

Using Your Own Blog to Drive Traffic

You’ve started up your site. You’ve diligently written the best possible content, rewritten it, spread it around. You’ve turned it in to a press release, a video, and a pod cast. Your blog is up and running, and you’re trying to figure out your next step.

What’s next? You need a new idea to give your website that extra boost. Gimmicks have their place, but consider using them on your blog, rather than your site. In fact, a well run blog with lots of traffic might be your best source of click-through traffic ever. If you can get an overwhelming percentage of visitors to click over to your blog, you achieved the whole point of running a blog of your own.

Don’t get me wrong. Blogs are fun, and some blogs are JUST for fun, but there is no denying that a blog can be a powerful tool. You can search optimize it just like a website for traffic, and drive that traffic straight on through to your main website.

You can do things with a blog you might not necessarily try on your site itself, and here are just a few ideas to get you started.

Spread the word about a contest. People love contests, and if you can come up with an inventive one they will drop in to participate. Use a buzz word to get people’s attention.

Start a poll. These are almost as popular as contests. Folks love to share their opinion on anything and everything. Again, find a catchy keyword.

Ask a question. People will leap at the chance to answer it for you – everyone likes to feel smarter than somebody else.

Give away free stuff. This is an awesome way to pull people in – do you have any idea how many people type in the word ‘free’ in searches every day? This concept is actually worth a paragraph or two.

Free stuff doesn’t have to be fancy – or even concrete. If you have the resources to send out stuff by mail, then by all means offer material things, but the cheapest and most immediate way is to come up with an e-book or a clever calculating tool they can download.

You can advertise it on your blog, and have them click through to your site to actually get their hands on it. This keeps you from having to waste a lot of space on your site to promote the freebie, and leaves room to advertise your real product.

Put a Digg button on your blog. The social networks are an open portal to your customers, so take advantage of every opportunity to get noticed.

Share articles from your blog with other blogs on similar topics. If you can get links to your blog, you can convert visitors into click-through traffic to your website.

Your blog can be the most powerful traffic driving tool you have. Think of it as a funnel; you gather all the traffic and links to your blog, and gear your blog towards your site in such a way that most of your traffic will continue through to your main site. If you spend time growing your blog, it might just turn into your website’s best friend!